Presented with the support of the French Film and TV Office in Los
Angeles, French Embassy.

"I came up the hard way; I was a gopher for Jean Becker and
René Clément, an assistant director to Claude Berri and Claude Zidi. I was never the
kind of cinephile who belonged to any club. I didn't get down on my knees at the Cahiers
du Cinéma altar."  Jean-Jacques Beineix

Best known for his surprise cult hits DIVA and BETTY BLUE,
director Jean-Jacques Beineix studied medicine, before deciding to indulge his
obsession for cinema. In his early teen years in the late 1950s, he made 8mm shorts with
his friends. He established a foothold in the French film industry as a hardworking,
reliable assistant director in the early 1970s (including work on the legendary, lost
Jerry Lewis film THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED). In 1977, he made his first professional short
film, "Mr. Michels Dog," which won first prize at the Trouville
Festival. His debut feature DIVA drew an initially chilly reception in France, but gained
momentum in arthouses across the globe, especially in the U.S. Ultimately, it was compared
to the work of Orson Welles and garnered four Cesar Awards in 1982, including Best First
Work. The criminally underrated THE MOON IN THE GUTTER followed (adapted from
American noir scribe David Goodis novel), starring Gerard Depardieu and Nastassja
Kinski. MOON drew flack for its dreamlike stylization, but its reputation continues to
grow with each passing year. In 1983, Beineix released one of his most popular films,
BETTY BLUE (currently in restored re-release), a work that solidified his cult of fans and
was nominated for a Foreign-Language Film Oscar. Ever the rebellious iconoclast, Beineix
refused to be relegated to any specific genre and defied expectations with his next, ROSELYNE
AND THE LIONS (here in its U.S. Premiere!), his mysterious, hard-to-see look at a love
affair set against circus life. In the 1990s, his output was sporadic, yet fascinating,
including feature films IP5: THE ISLAND OF THE PACHYDERMS (Yves Montands last
picture) with Olivier Martinez and the offbeat documentary about Japanese cyber-nerds,
OTAKU, as well as acclaimed work for French television. Beineixs latest, hard-to-see
feature, MORTAL TRANSFER (with Jean-Hugues Anglaide) from 2001, is a
supremely entertaining return to the stylized, slyly comic type of thriller that first
brought him international fame. All films in French with English subtitles unless
otherwise noted. Please join us in welcoming director
Jean-Jacques Beineix in-person for this brief, but long overdue Los Angeles retrospective
of his work.

Thursday, July 2  7:30 PM

Director Jean-Jacques Beineix In-Person!

THE MOON IN THE GUTTER (LA LUNE
DANS LE CANIVEAU), 1983, Cinema Libre,137 min. Director Jean-Jacques
Beineixs terrifically atmospheric and vastly underrated adaptation of David
Goodis noir classic stars Gerard Depardieu as a raffish longshoreman who
mourns the suicide of his raped sister amongst the bars and sleazy dives of the seedy
Marseilles waterfront. When mystery girl Nastassja Kinski goes slumming in his
neighborhood, Depardieu is bewitched by her beauty and soon learns she may know something
about the identity of his siblings attacker. Beinieix updates writer Goodis
dark urban underworld into a color-coded dreamland of nightmarish regret and longing, yet
still somehow faithfully retains the essence of the original novel. Delirious, audacious
and unashamed of its breathtakingly stylized sets. "Visually stunning Beineix
succeeds in creating a dream world where you can expect anything in the next moment, good
or bad."  The Spinning Image (UK) (Screened from a digital source) NOT ON DVD

Preceded by the short: "Mr.
Michels Dog" (1977, 14 min.) Beineixs very first serious (and
award-winning) foray into filmmaking. Discussion following the
feature film with director Jean-Jacques Beineix. Trailer

Sunday, July 5  7:30 PM

Director Jean-Jacques Beineix In-Person!

U.S. Premiere!ROSELYNE AND THE LIONS (ROSELYNE ET LES LIONS),
1989, Cinema Libre, 170 min. Dir. Jean-Jacques Beineix. Thierry (Gerard Sandoz)
drops out of school to apprentice as a circus lion tamer. Soon after, he and fellow
trainee Roselyne (Isabelle Pasco) fall in love, hes fired, and Roselyne
leaves with him. The lovebirds journey across France looking for work, hitting up various
circuses along the way. Finally they get closer to their aspirations when theyre
hired on by a German circus in Munich and both fall under the tutelage of aging big-cat
trainer Klint (Gunter Meisner). Beineixs highly unusual, magical film has
never been released in America. Dont miss this rare opportunity! NOT ON DVD Trailer

Preceded by the short: "Locked-In
Syndrome" (1997, 27 min.) Come see director Beineixs original short take on
the true story that would eventually be remade as the award-winning feature THE DIVING
BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY. Discussion following the feature film
with director Jean-Jacques Beineix. (TBC)

Wednesday, July 8  7:30 PM

Jean-Jacques Beineix Double Feature:

Los Angeles Premiere! MORTAL TRANSFER (MORTEL TRANSFERT), 2001, Cinema Libre, 122
min. Overwhelmed psychoanalyst Michel (Jean-Hugues Anglade) falls asleep while
listening to sado-masochist kleptomaniac patient Olga (Helene de Fougerolles) and
awakens to find her strangled. Panicking, he decides to get rid of her body himself, lest
he be saddled with her murder. Complications erupt when Olgas rich husband (Yves
Renier) comes looking for stolen money and Michels other neurotic patients
clamour for attention. Director Jean-Jacques Beineix keeps a mesmerizing balance on
a tightrope between poisonously dark comedy and psychological thriller. This is another of
Beineixs films almost impossible to see in America since its original European
release. (Screened from a digital source) "Beineix is aiming for the sort of
darkly comic details and plausibly presented incongruities favored by, say, the Coen
brothers there is a methodical genre-bending at work that draws much inspiration from
the wrong man school of film noir Widescreen results are sumptuous in a
perfectly controlled, borderline surreal register the level of craft is still
unmistakable "  Lisa Nesselson, VarietyNOT
ON DVD Trailer

DIVA, 1981, Rialto Pictures, 123 min.
Director Jean-Jacques Beineix scored a bulls-eye internationally at arthouse
box offices with his debut film, a deftly constructed soufflé of a suspense thriller with
a comic, tongue-in-cheek tone. Postman and opera fanatic Jules (Frederic Andrei)
surreptitiously records his idol, diva Cynthia (Wilhemenia Wiggins Fernandez), and
is so overcome by her performance that he steals her costume from her dressing room, which
causes a scandal. Later, while on his rounds, he encounters two thugs beating up a woman
and is the unwitting recipient of a blackmail tape that the victim sneaks into his letter
bag. Soon the chase is on, with not only the hoods (including Dominic Pinon) but
also Taiwanese music bootleggers hoping to steal his opera cassette. Before things come to
a head, Jules befriends singer Cynthia and is aided in his escape from danger by a teenage
Vietnamese street girl and a sophisticated mystery man (Richard Bohringer). " One
of the best thrillers of recent years but, more than that, it is a brilliant film, a
visual extravaganza that announces the considerable gifts of its young director,
Jean-Jacques Beineix Filled with so many small character touches, so many perfectly
observed intimacies, so many visual inventions, from the sly to the grand, that the
thriller plot is just a bonus Pauline Kael has compared Beineix to Orson Welles and,
as Welles so often did, he has made a movie that is a feast to look at, regardless of its
subject."  Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-TimesTrailer